The Ghost Writer (25 page)

She lifted out the bundle, set it down on the bed, and began, very cautiously, to unwrap it. The object had been placed inside the waist of the gown, with the rest of the fabric folded around it. Not liking to reach inside, and trying not to stand too close, Cordelia began to lift the gown away. But her hands were seized by a sudden tremor; the thing slid out very suddenly, and before she could stop it, rolled off the edge of the bed and smashed to fragments. All she retained was the impression of something like a distended electric light bulb, with long thin tubes or spikes of glass at both ends. There was one of the broken-off glass spikes, with a needle-like wire emerging from the end of it ... and part of another; and a small square of thin dark metal, curved like a curling leaf, ... and a third fragment of glass tubing, connected by wire to another metal square, the same size, but flat, and silvered like the back of a mirror.

Her curiosity was blotted out by the realisation of what she had done. They could lose the income, and the house; and Harry, for all his loyalty, was the last person she could tell. She must wrap up the fragments, put everything back in the box, and pray that nobody ever opened it again. As she moved to drape the gown over the bed, she saw that it was, undoubtedly, the gown that Imogen de Vere was wearing in the portrait.

And now she would have to sweep up all of the broken glass, and bundle it up in the gown ... which she found she was holding so as to measure it against herself; it looked exactly her size. Though terribly crumpled, it was only a little musty. And the jagged edges would tear the velvet ... no; she could not. The packing had been so flat, when the lid came off; it had surely never been disturbed. She draped the gown across the bed and unfolded one of the pieces of paper.
The Times.
Friday, 3rd December, 1896. Which would have been, from her recollection of her uncles narrative, either just before, or shortly after Henry St Clair's things had been seized by the bailiffs.

But he would never have treated the gown with such contempt, assuming Imogen had left it at the studio. This was de Vere's work ... all the more reason not to do his bidding. That green dress she had not worn for ages would do perfectly well to wrap the fragments. Meanwhile, it struck her that the safest place for the gown would be in the closet in Grandmama's room, which she had not entered since the day Papa had caught her wearing the veil; nor, so far as she knew, had anyone else. But if Uncle Theodore happened to go up to his room, two doors along from Grandmama's ... she decided to hide the gown in her own closet for the time being, and wait until the coast was clear.

When she had swept up the glass and got the lid back on the box, she came downstairs and established that her uncle was dozing in his study. Then, without quite knowing why, she went back up to the first floor and let herself quietly into her grandmother's room.

Dust swirled as she crossed the floor and drew open the curtains. The stale, musty air was still warm from the previous day's heat. The furniture seemed to have shrunk; the swing mirror no longer towered over her. A faint odour of camphor greeted her as she opened the closet door, along with a vivid memory of playing at ghosts with Beatrice. Several dresses hung from the rail, all in sombre colours, and all "sensible", like the stout shoes on the floor. Imogen, she reminded herself, had arrived here in the clothes she stood up in. What had happened to the magnificent wardrobe she must have had at Belgrave Square? Her jewels? Books, letters, keepsakes? De Vere must have sold or destroyed everything else.

As she wandered about the room, Cordelia was struck by the realisation that her habit of thinking of Imogen de Vere and Grandmama as two separate people was in no way fanciful. Whether or not he had caused the illness—"his spittle burned like acid", she recalled Uncle Theodore saying—Imogen de Vere had died to the world, and perhaps even to herself that night, and woken as Grandmama, condemned always to wear a veil ... which Papa must have returned to the bottom drawer of the press, for there it was, laid out exactly as she had seen it last.

Breathing again the scents of camphor and some sort of salve or balm, mixed with the faintest hint of another fragrance, Cordelia felt a sudden powerful urge to put it on, and for the second time in her life, she drew the black veil over her head and turned towards the mirror.

The verse about seeing in a glass darkly came to her. No wonder she had given herself—and Papa—such a fright. Her dress looked strangely incongruous below the veil, as though her own head and shoulders had been replaced with those of another person whose outlines could be glimpsed, in the stronger light from the window, floating in a black mist of gauze.

A floorboard creaked in the corridor outside. She drew off the veil and held her breath, listening, but there was no further sound beyond the faint thudding of her heart, and when she opened the door cautiously and looked out, the corridor was empty. Feeling that it would be safer in her own room, she folded the veil and carried it upstairs, where she hid it away in her closet, beside the emerald green gown.

***

T
HE MANTEL CLOCK CHIMED THE HALF-HOUR
. T
HE
clouds had sunk even lower, merging into a uniform, leaden grey like the underside of a fog-bank which hung, seemingly motionless, just above the treetops across the lane. If he had arrived on the six o'clock train, he would surely be here by now; there would be at least another hour to wait.

Why
could he never be on time? She would have run all the way from Bloomsbury to Victoria rather than sacrifice an hour in his company. Suddenly angry, she slid down off the window-ledge and made for the stairs. She would walk as far as the village, just in case, and then circle back to the stream, where she could at least bathe her feet in cool water.

The light beneath the trees was very dim; there was still not a breath of wind. She had gone about a hundred yards when she heard the sound of voices, and stopped beneath the deeper shadow of an oak.

Harry and Beatrice appeared at the next turning, some thirty yards away. They were walking slowly, close together and deep in conversation. Should she wave, or call out? As they approached, still without seeing her, though she was dressed in white—the same creamy-white sleeveless dress she had worn that first afternoon—Cordelia began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. They had come within a few paces when she stepped out into the middle of the lane.

[Here the typescript broke off at the foot of a page.]

HATHERLEY. Descendant anxious to trace family history. Would anyone with any information about the early life and antecedents of Phyllis May Hatherley, granddaughter of Viola Hatherley, born Marylebone, London, 13 April 1929, married Graham John Freeman (1917–1982) in Mawson, South Australia, on 4 May 1963, died 29 May 1999, please contact her son, Gerard Freeman...

***

c/o Lansdown and Grierstone
Commissioners for Oaths
14A Bedford Row
London WC1N 5AB
12 June 1999

Dear Mr Freeman,

I am writing in reply to your advertisement in this mornings Times. I am afraid I am not equipped to reply by fax or email as you suggest, and hope that you will be able to decipher my arthritic handwriting! I hope, too, that you will accept a strangers condolences on the recent death of your mother.

To come straight to the point: in 1944 I was moved, due to the upheavals of the war, to St Margaret's School in Devon to complete my education. My new form mistress (who believed in order above all things) did not allow personal preference to determine the seating arrangements in her classroom. Desks were assigned alphabetically by surname, and so I was placed next to a girl called Anne Hatherley, who soon became my closest friend.

Anne Hatherley and her younger sister Phyllis (whom I never met, though we once spoke on the telephone) were brought up in London by their grandmother, Viola Hatherley, and their aunt Iris, Violas unmarried daughter. I felt certain, therefore, as soon as I saw your advertisement, that your late mother and my dear friend's sister must be one and the same person. To make doubly sure, I re-read some of Anne's letters this morning, and established that Phyllis's birthday was the 13th of April. Anne was born on the 6th of March, 1928, and since Phyllis was just a year younger than her sister, the dates match perfectly.

Viola Hatherley died just after VE Day, and Anne was of course obliged to leave school immediately and return to London. I remained at home in Plymouth, but Anne and I wrote constantly for the next four years, and saw each other whenever we could. Her Aunt Iris died in the autumn of 1949, and soon after that Anne's letters abruptly ceased. I never heard from her again.

I shall, of course, be only too pleased to help you in any way I can. Do please write to me by sealed enclosure, c/o my solicitor, Mr Giles Grierstone, who handles all of my affairs, including my correspondence. I wonder—and I do hope you won't be offended by this—whether you would mind providing him with formal proof of your own, and your late mother's identity, including, if possible, photographs. Anything you send him will be treated in the strictest confidence.

Though you do not mention Anne in your advertisement, I do hope you will be able to tell me what became of her; I have never ceased to wonder.

Yours sincerely
(Miss) Abigail Hamish

c/o Lansdown and Grierstone
Commissioners for Oaths
14A Bedford Row
London WC1N 5AB
27 June 1999

Dear Mr Freeman,

Thank you very much for your kind and most informative letter. I do appreciate all the trouble you have gone to in providing Mr Grierstone with so much documentation, and so promptly. The photograph of your mother in the full bloom of youth, nursing your infant self, is most touching—I can certainly see a resemblance to Anne as I remember her. An aversion to being photographed must have run in the family, for Anne steadfastly refused to give me even a single snapshot of herself.

It was indeed a shock to learn that your mother always spoke of herself as an only child. Yet I was not wholly surprised, for reasons I could not divulge until we had established beyond doubt that your mother was Anne's younger sister. I fear that what follows will prove distressing, but you have urged me to be frank, and I shall do my best.

There is very little I can tell you about your mother's childhood. Like your mother (perhaps it will be easier if I call her Phyllis), Anne almost never spoke of the loss of her parents; she herself was only two years old when the accident happened. They were brought up by their grandmother and their aunt Iris, in very comfortable surroundings; they had a nurse, and a cook, and a maid, and later a governess, and had never known any other life. By the time I met her, Anne had come to believe that her childhood would not have been nearly as happy had her parents lived. Whether Phyllis felt the same, I simply don't know. The war of course brought great upheaval: the girls, like so many children, were sent away from London when the bombing began in earnest. Iris and two of her spiritualist friends—she was a devout believer in'séances and ouija boards and so on, despite Viola's scorn for such activities (odd that Viola, who wrote ghost stories, should have been the sceptic)—but I see I am getting into one of those parenthetical muddles that Miss Tremayne (the form mistress who believed in order above all things) was always warning me against.

Iris, I was going to say, took a cottage at Okehampton so as to be near the girls, but Viola refused to leave London, even at the height of the Blitz. The Germans, she declared, were not going to drive her out of her house. Though I never met Viola, Anne took me to tea with Iris on two or three occasions. Auntie's very sweet,' I remember her saying, 'but she will talk about her spirits as if they're real people you ought to be able to see. I've never minded, but it gets on Filly's nerves.' All I can recall of Iris is that she was tall and slightly stooped; my memory for faces is usually very good, but hers won't come to me as anything more than a vague impression of kindness. I have a feeling she may have been very short-sighted. Anne told me later that Iris lost her fiancé in the Great War and never got over it—but I am wandering from the point again.

The reason I never met Phyllis was that she left St Margaret's a few months before I arrived, to study typing and shorthand, I'm afraid I don't know where. I do know that she was working for a firm of solicitors in Clerkenwell soon after the war. Viola, you see, believed that girls should be able to earn their living, regardless of expectations. Anne had hoped to go on to Oxford, but Viola's death changed everything. Iris went quite to pieces, and because she and Phyllis did not really get on, much of the burden necessarily fell upon Anne. Of course they had no idea, when Viola died, that Iris had only a few years left to live.

As I think I mentioned in my previous letter, I was obliged to remain with my family in Plymouth. My own father was ill—he had served as an engineer with the Eighth Army, and his lungs were badly affected by diesel fumes—and I was needed to help look after him. Perhaps that was part of the bond with Anne. Our circumstances then were surprisingly similar. Viola's estate had been much reduced by the war, and if she had lived much longer, they would have had to sell the house to pay the punitive death duties that came in with Mr Attlee. And of course we were all coping with the exigencies of rationing, the constant shortages and so forth. We went on writing, and Anne came down to Plymouth several times to stay with us. My father was very strict, and would not allow me to go up to London on my own, much as I would have loved to.

I still remember those visits as the happiest days of my life. Anne was (or so I have always thought) an exceptionally beautiful young woman, quite without vanity—she had a lightness about her, a natural freedom from self-consciousness, or perhaps I mean self-absorption—but I must get on.

In the spring of 1949, Anne met a young man called Hugh Montfort. She was uncharacteristically reticent about him—perhaps fearing that I would be hurt by this new attachment—but as the weeks went by his name began to appear more and more frequently in her letters. It was plain that he was spending a great deal of time at the house. On the 30th of July she wrote to tell me he had asked her to marry him. She wanted to bring him down to Plymouth to meet me as soon as he could get away for a few days. But she never did. By the 20th of September it was all off. 'I promise I'll tell you everything, Abbie,' she wrote, 'but not just yet.'

Then on the 1st of October I got a hurried scrawl. 'The most awful thing has happened,' she wrote. 'Auntie and Phyllis have had the most dreadful set-to, I can't say what about, but Filly has run away. She packed two suitcases and left in a taxi, we don't know where she's gone, and Auntie has sent for Pitt the Elder' (Mr Pitt, their solicitor, it was a family joke) 'and I'm afraid she means to change her will. We're all at sixes and sevens—I'll write as soon as ever I can, love always, Anne.'

On the 8th of October she wrote a brief note to tell me that her aunt had died suddenly, of heart failure. Iris was only sixty-two. Of course I pleaded with my father to let me go up to town, but he would not allow it. I telephoned the house several times (from a call box—we did not have the telephone at home) but there was no answer, and no reply to my letters.

At last I resolved to defy my father. I took the money from my post office savings, caught the train to Paddington, and made my way, with much trepidation, to Ferrier's Close in Hampstead. The house, I should have said, was built by a bachelor uncle of Viola's. She was his favourite, and he left it to her outright. It was right on the edge of the Heath, in the gloomiest corner of the Vale of Health—or so it seemed to me. Anne had described the house so often and so vividly I felt I had been there, but in her descriptions it was always sunlit. On that bleak, cheerless November day, it looked more like a prison. The brick wall at the front was topped with broken glass, and so high that I could only see the upstairs windows. The blinds were down, the curtains drawn. No smoke rose from the chimneys. The only entry was through a wooden door in the front wall. Anne had told me that this door was always kept unlocked during the daytime, if there was anyone home, but it would not open. I stood shivering in the lane for nearly an hour, until all I could think to do was leave a note in the letter-box and begin the long journey home.

My parents, when they had got over their anger, took the view that it was none of our business. Of course Anne couldn't have stayed there alone, they said; she must have gone to relatives or friends. It was sheer selfishness on my part to expect her to write at a time of such grief. I could see the sense of this, but I was not convinced. Eventually I summoned the courage to look up Mr Pitt's address—I could think of no one else to approach—and write to him. He replied by return, to say that he had heard nothing from Anne for three months—it was now February—and would I please call at his office in Holborn as soon as convenient?

Mr Pitt's letter was alarming enough, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock that followed. On the 26th of October (a fortnight before my own fruitless visit to the Vale of Health), Anne had come to see him in his office. Aunt Iris had indeed changed her will a week before she died, cutting out Phyllis altogether and leaving everything she possessed to Anne. Now Anne insisted on making a will of her own—naming Mr Pitt as her executor, and leaving the entire estate to 'my dearest and most trusted friend Abigail Valerie Hamish'.

Of course (as he later admitted to me) Mr Pitt suspected undue influence, a designing young woman preying upon her grief-stricken friend, but when he saw how shaken I was by the news of the bequest—the recollection of it still makes me feel dizzy and short of breath—his manner softened perceptibly.

Surely, he had asked Anne several times, she did not mean to perpetuate her aunt's injustice toward Phyllis? To this Anne would only reply, very despondently, that she
knew,
for reasons she would not discuss, that her sister would never accept a penny from her. He told her that she was in no state to make decisions (she was looking very unwell, he thought, and her face had come out in a rash) but she would not listen. He brought out every argument he could summon, but in the end she declared, exactly as her aunt had done a few weeks earlier, that if he would not do as she asked, she would go to another solicitor. 'I can't stay in London,' he remembered her saying, 'I have to get away, and I want you to look after things for me.' Very reluctantly, he agreed. She signed the will, and promised to keep in touch with him.

By the time I came to see him, Mr Pitt was already anxious about her safety. Even more alarming than her silence was the fact that no money had been withdrawn from her account. He alerted the police, and advertised repeatedly, asking anyone who knew the whereabouts of Anne or Phyllis to contact him, all without result. Of course we did not know that your mother had emigrated to Australia, which explains her silence. So much grief, as I have often reflected, sprang from that one quarrel between your mother and her aunt. Such a pity—but I must get on.

As the years passed with no news of Anne, I remained closely in touch with Mr Pitt. He was in his sixties when I first met him, and when ill health forced him to retire, he prevailed upon me to assume the role of executor. (There was no Pitt the Younger, you see, that was part of the joke.) After he died, I took my business to a Mr Urquhart, who proved unsatisfactory, and thence to Lansdown and Grierstone, with whom, as you can see, I have remained ever since. I was advised by Mr Urquhart that, as nothing had been heard of Anne for more than seven years, I ought to commence proceedings to have her declared legally dead, and take possession of the estate. This, of course, I refused ever to contemplate.

I should have mentioned that when the police came to search the house, they found nothing amiss, and concluded that Anne had simply packed her things, locked up the house and left. Mr Pitt, I know, was much troubled by the fear that she might have made away with herself; I have never allowed myself to believe that she would do such a thing, just as I have never ceased to hope that she is still alive. But I confess that not knowing has caused me much torment. I seem to have spent the greater part of my life waiting for news of Anne. And now, quite suddenly it seems, I am an old woman, and must think about my own will as well as fulfilling my duty to the estate.

I am very tired—so much emotion revisited—and must make an end of this long letter. Writing it has stirred, once again, my passionate yearning to
know,
for certain, what became of my best and dearest friend, what really happened during those last troubled months before her disappearance: why she broke her engagement to Hugh Montfort, and what (if you will forgive my curiosity) precipitated the disastrous falling-out between your mother and Iris. My intuition has always hinted that the answers are to be found somewhere in the house by the Heath. In earlier years—after I had accepted the post of executor and could legitimately enter the house—I came up to town several times with the intention of making a thorough search. But the house is very large, not to say labyrinthine, and daunting, even by day, to a single woman who hears an intruder in every creaking board! It is many years—decades, indeed, since I last set foot in it. And of course I never liked to employ an outsider.

I wonder, therefore—since you will be in London very shortly—whether, before you come down to see me, as I very much hope you will, you would be kind enough to look over the house for me, just to see if anything turns up in the way of letters, notebooks, diaries and so forth. As a professional librarian, you will I am sure be interested in the Ferrier family library, which contains several thousand books. I am afraid the electricity was disconnected many years ago, and the garden is dreadfully overgrown, but it will be high summer when you arrive. Mr Grierstone will have the keys waiting for you at Bedford Row. And please feel free to follow your instinct wherever it may lead. Perhaps it is merely an old woman's fancy, but I feel there is a destiny at work here, and that if anyone is ever to uncover the answers, it will be you.

I am very much looking forward to meeting you.

Yours most sincerely,
Abigail Hamish

Lansdown and Grierstone
Commissioners for Oaths
14A Bedford Row
London WC1N 5AB
12 July 1999

Dear Mr Freeman,

We have received your letter addressed to our client Miss Abigail Hamish. I regret to inform you that Miss Hamish has suffered a slight stroke and is undergoing treatment in a private nursing home. It may be some weeks before she is well enough to reply to your letter, or to receive visitors.

In the meantime, however, we are instructed to make available to you the keys to the house at Ferrier's Close 34, Heath Villas, Hampstead. These may be collected at the above address at your convenience, on presentation of appropriate identification, such as your passport.

Yours faithfully,
Giles Grierstone